5  

It is legend locally that President Theodore Roosevelt, in plain view at a window table in the Finlen Hotel, heartily ate a steak as the admiring citizenry of Butte looked on. Not so well remembered is what he wanted for dessert: hearts of monopolists, sauced with justice. It was the late, great Teddy who dubbed them, let us not forget, “malefactors of great wealth.”

There is no wealth greater, in this city and state and far beyond, than that of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Nor is there a malefaction—mark it well: the word comes from Latin, malus meaning “bad, ill, evil” and facere meaning “to do”—more unjust than the grip of the copper colossus on the legislative process of the Treasure State.

An appetite for change, anyone?

GRACE WAS EVEN MORE RIGHT than she knew, in remarking that my calling had been found, or as I preferred to think of it, I had been searched out by a fitting profession at last. For I stepped forth from Horse Thief Row and down the sloping streets of Butte to the newspaper office each day with a hum in my heart and words flowing in my head. Oh, I was aware of the old bromide that an editorial writer does nothing more than observe from the high ground until the battle is over, then descend and shoot the wounded on both sides. But that was not the Butte fashion, not the Thunder style. I was proud that from the first inked copy off the press, I, or at least Pluvius, was in the thick of the crusade against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and its despotic power over the mines and the city and the state. And if I could enlist the lately deceased trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt into the cause, so much the better.

Grace dramatically read my latest Thunder salvo to the suppertime audience, Hoop and Griff chewing along in agreement, while Sandison sat back in judgment.

Finished, she stretched to pass the newspaper back to me across the huge dining room table, where the five of us spent mealtimes like picnickers at a wharf. “That should give them indigestion at Anaconda headquarters, if that’s what you wanted.”

“Well put, madam.” Sandison turned to me. “Taunting doesn’t get the job done in the end. When do you get down to brass tacks?” Hoop and Griff perked up their ears at the phrase.

“All in good time,” I said with the air of invincibility fitting to an editorialist. “It is a matter of tactics.”

•   •   •

How often does a name fit so perfectly it cannot be improved on? From the very start, the atmosphere around the Thunder held that tingle of anticipation that the air carries before a rain. The spell was contagious. With its aroma of ink and paper and cigarette smoke and its staccato blurts of writing machines and jingling of telephones, the newsroom was a strangely exciting place where nothing definitive seemed to be happening, yet everything was. A newspaper is a daily miracle, a collective collaboration of wildly different authors cramped into columns of print that somehow digest into the closest thing to truth about humankind’s foibles and triumphs there is, i.e., the draft of history, and no day had yet come when I was not profoundly glad to do my part.

The staff, a high-spirited bunch, raucously welcomed me into their number. In the newspaper world, you can be a boozehound, a Lothario, a grouch, a moocher, almost anything, and if you can sit up to the keys of a typewriter and play the English language as if on a grand piano, you are prized. So it was with me, none of the usual journalists’ peccadilloes attached to my person, and my prose as quick as my fingers—Armbrister never had to hover over me near deadline—was abundantly acclaimed. Moreover, my reputation in the newsroom grew when there was confusion at the copy desk over Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell, and I rattled off the couplet that distinguished the ill-fated royal minister from the later Lord Protector: Tommy bowed before the king and lost his head / Ollie stood tall and the king lost his instead. One of the old hands working the rim cackled and called out, “What are you, a walking encyclopedia?” As a brand-new journalistic enterprise the Thunder lacked a morgue, a newspaper’s library, and after that I was often called on to fill in. Routinely an outcry from somewhere in the newsroom would be heard, such as “Quick, Morrie, who was the inventor of the guillotine?” and I would furnish the answer. Some wag soon modified Morrie to Morgie, a conflation of name and role that I rather liked, and I felt thoroughly established in the fellowship of the press.

Meanwhile, it was up to Pluvius, among my wardrobe of names, to wage battle with the Post and by implication its puppet masters high atop Butte and loftier yet on Wall Street. My editorial-page opposite number went under the inane nom de plume of Scriptoris. The fool; he was self-evidently a writer, or at least a typist. Why waste the Latin? That aside, the journalistic exchange of insults was something like the stutter step when you meet someone in your path and each moves in front of the other.

The Post:

That organ of propaganda trying to pass as a newspaper seems not to know even the basics of the mining industry, that smelter smoke is the smell of money.

The Thunder:

Also of lung disease, the leading cause of death among miners and their families.

The Post:

The latest diatribe from that ill-named broadsheet down by the district of ill fame disputes the right of the largest employer in the state to make itself known in the halls of the legislature. We ask you, what is wrong with proper representation of management and capital in civic debates?

The Thunder:

Representation is one thing, colonial domination is another. Anaconda has made Montana the Congo of America.

•   •   •

Yet, in this gloves-off fight, part of the foe was always out of reach. A villain is supposed to have an identifiable face, the more prominent the wicked features, the better the target. Against this classic rule, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company wore the most impassive mask in America: that of Wall Street. Oh, there were names, fearsome ones—the Rockefellers and Henry Rogerses of the dragon’s nest of all monopolies, Standard Oil—attached to its corporate ownership, but those kept their distance from Butte and bloody deeds in the streets; and their hirelings, while notorious enough locally, comprised a shifting cast of characters there in the loft of the Hennessy Building. “Quin and I agree on that much—you never quite know who you’re dealing with, they come and go like shadows,” Jared spoke from experience in round after round at the bargaining table over wages and safety conditions in the mines, negotiations that seemed to have no end. The only thing to be counted on was that up on that top floor, men in celluloid collars worked to keep the copper collar tight on the workers of the mines and the rest of society that constituted Montana as well. Faceless as it was heartless, Anaconda to all appearances could be attacked only by barrage, as the Thunder was doing, yet any thinking person pined for the one sure blow that would bring a giant down.

“You’re doing your part like a real fighter,” Jared applauded my free-swinging editorial style. “Just what we need.” He now had to divide himself between the ongoing Butte struggle and the legislative session under way in Helena, and the double effort showed on him. His dark, deep Welsh eyes seemed to hold more than ever, calculations on two fronts active behind his gaze when he came by the newsroom to confer with Armbrister and me.

“Unlike Ulcer Gulch, it at least sounds like something is getting done around here,” he ruefully contrasted legislative life with the contrapuntal rhythms of typewriters and telephones around the trio of us in session at the editor’s desk. Three and a variable fraction, actually, as he had Russian Famine along, fresh from selling the Thunder on the street as the newest of our newsboys, while Rab attended to some after-hours task at the detention school. The lad was in motion even standing still, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, taking his cap off and putting it back on, restlessness accentuated by indoor confinement. Absently stopping him from playing with the spindle where Armbrister spiked the overset, stories waiting to be used, Jared thought out loud to the other two of us.

“It’s pretty much as we figured, a lot of legislators don’t move a muscle without orders from the top floor of the Hennessy Building. But you’d be surprised how many don’t like it that way. I get the feeling there are quite a few, maybe enough to do us some real good, who’d turn their back on Anaconda if they thought they could get away with it.” His quickness of thought always surprised me. “What’s the Latin for that, do you suppose, Professor?”

“Mmm, perhaps most aptly, Ad rei publicae rationes aliquid referre. To consider a thing from the political point of view.”

“To be scared to death of a kick in the slats from the voters,” Armbrister translated more aptly yet. “But how do we get them panicked enough in Ulcer Gulch to ditch Anaconda?”

“That’s the trick entirely,” Jared granted. “We’ll need to come up with something that’ll do it, later in the session, when I learn the ropes a little more.” Uncomfortably realizing how much he was sounding like a politician, he made a face. “Some of the old bulls in the cloakroom gave me the wink on how to get anything done in Ulcer Gulch, which is to take it easy, take my time. Save anything big for my maiden speech, is what it amounts to. Oh, I know”—he raised his hands against Armbrister and me reacting as newspapermen were bound to at any letup whatsoever in the campaign against Anaconda—“it’s going to be hard for all of us, holding our fire.” His face took on the rigid set of a combatant who had learned that in the trenches of the western front. “The waiting is always the worst part.” Then he was back from the past, taking the edge off with what could pass for a grin. “In the meantime I have to watch out for what happens to maidens, don’t I.”

Russian Famine worked on that while the others of us laughed in manly fashion, then Jared sobered into his publisher’s role. “Don’t get me wrong, the Thunder and the Professor’s editorials read like Holy Writ to me, but I wonder if we’re getting across to people, or is that going to take until Judgment Day, too?” He jerked his head toward the Gibraltar always to be conquered, the Hill. “I made the rounds through the tunnels at chow time, and I hate to say so, but more men had their noses into the funnies than the editorial page.”

I winced at that, but Armbrister merely lifted his hawklike shoulders. “That’s what we’re up against in this business. Morgie can write in purple and gold and still not get them away from Krazy Kat.”

Truer words were never heard, according to Famine’s rapid nods. “Krazy’s my favorite,” he piped up in a voice as thin as the rest of him. “Boy, Ignatz Mouse really knows how to throw a brick, and Offissa Pupp always after him, that’s good stuff. I even read the funnies some in school,” he confided to us in man-to-man fashion, “if Mrs. Evans don’t catch me.” Armbrister’s sardonic expression said, There, see?

The boy’s testimonial made me think. “Perhaps what’s lacking is some compelling entertainment of our own.” I asked Armbrister, “Those small items that fill in the bottom of a page—what are they called?”

“Fillers.”

“Exactly, those. Just suppose we were to use that space instead for brief submissions from the miners in their native languages. Say, oh, Finnish one time and Italian the next and on down the line, day by day. Jokes, sayings, bits of song. Perhaps call it ‘Voices from the Hill.’ It might draw their eyes to the editorial page.”

Jared turned to Armbrister. “Jacob, what do you think?”

What the editor thought could be read in his grimace. “It’d be a hell of a headache to deal with in the page makeup. But you’re the publisher.”

“I guess I am. We’ll give it a try.” Jared already was half laughing. “Any contributors close to home you happen to have in mind, Professor, just for instance?”

•   •   •

And so we entered the period of what I think of as the skirmishing before the decisive battle, daily editorial blasts of whatever caliber I and my opposite number at the Post could come up with, heavy artillery yet to be brought to bear. In the set of reflections where a person reads his or her life, I would not have traded that experience for anything, nor, as it turned out, would anything have persuaded me to repeat it ever again.

The home front, so to speak, was seldom quiet during this. It is scarcely fair to say the Sandison mansion was a white elephant. More like a woolly mammoth, hard to know where to attack. Palatial to live in, mostly—the music room with its Mikado wallpaper aside—the spacious residence simply demanded this, that, and the other be done to it, upkeep without end. The furnace tended to balk, the plumbing to gulp. A stair tread somehow would work loose in the night, necessitating a storm of hammering by Griff and Hoop the next morning. The rain gutter over the front stoop sagged in a V under the weight of icicles, daggers of ice as if to challenge Ajax. The ladder work it took the pair of them to repair it practically constituted mountaineering. Grace indubitably had a point about the manse needing them. The best I could furnish was support of another sort, that countenance of a natural-born home owner, even if the snail analogy did keep creeping up on me.

Accordingly, the day I came in after work and saw that the dining room table was not yet set, I made myself hum with apparent unconcern while I went to the kitchen to investigate.

Grace was so engrossed in the volume open before her on the meat block, she didn’t hear me enter the room. Assuming she was looking up a recipe, I cheerily called out, “Hello, chief cook and bottle washer. What’s for supper?”

Her head snapped up as though I had broken a hypnotic spell. “Nothing, yet,” she moaned, casting a frantic look across the kitchen at the clock. “The time got away from me.” She gestured helplessly at the open pages. “Oh, Morrie, it’s those books of his. I was just curious about what you and His Nibs see in them all the time, so I took one down to read a little. And now I can’t stop.”

I edged near enough to peek at the prose. Dickens. I might have known. “My dear, let’s trust that David Copperfield will prove to be the hero of his own life, at least long enough for us to put some food on the table, all right?” So saying, I traded my habitual daily complement of newspapers for an apron. “I’ll whip up some ham omelets and scalloped potatoes, how’s that sound?”

“Music to the ears.” Bustling toward the larder, she gave me a grateful peck on the cheek in passing. “What would I do without you, Mr. Morgan? Here, I can at least peel the spuds.”

We busied ourselves at the meal preparation, side by side. As the potato peelings flew, Grace regained herself. “Morrie? Now I have to ask you about some reading of your own. That paper.” She pointed the paring knife at the tabloid of shouting headlines that lay atop the comparatively quiet Thunder. “I didn’t say anything during baseball, when you tracked down the Sporting Whatsis even in London. Or football, when you would snatch up a copy as soon as we got off a boat or train. But this time of year? Please tell me you’re not doing something like betting on racing or”—she wrinkled her nose—“boxing.”

“No, no, worry not.” I hastened to justify the Sporting News. “Basketball, the winter sport. See there, the University of Chicago overwhelmed Northwestern, thirty-four to twenty-six. As a loyal alumnus, I am true blue to the Maroons, in a manner of speaking. I always follow their sporting exploits.”

Which was true as far as it went. The fuller explanation, which I was determined to spare her, was that I was keeping a careful watch on the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal. The ballplayers involved were getting the worst of it, banned from major league baseball, but so far the gamblers behind the fixed World Series were evading prosecution, not the outcome I devoutly wished for. If the fixers ever entirely escaped entanglement in the case, their criminal minds might well turn to the fortune lost to some mysterious bettor in the Montana hinterlands, the kind of curiosity I could not afford in more ways than one. That encounter in San Francisco showed that if Bailey could seek and find me, it was hardly beyond the capability of the Chicago gambling mob. My hope had to be that the gangsters were kept busy staying one jump ahead of the investigating authorities long enough for the so-called autumn classic of 1919 to fade into the history books. Time was on my side, at least.

Innocent of such concern, Grace paused in her peeling to tug mischievously at my apron strings. “You men and your games.”

•   •   •

With Griff and Hoop proclaiming, “Best meal in ages, Mrs. Morgan,” and Grace keeping a rueful silence, Sandison surprised us all by not grunting a good-night as usual when the last bite was done and going off to his lair of books. “Here, madam.” He thrust a squarish envelope across the table to Grace. “Morgan can read over your shoulder.” He tendered a similar envelope to the other side of the table. “You two can share one, surely.” Hoop opened it and Griff leaned over to read.

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE ANNUAL

ROBERT BURNS BIRTHDAY AND COSTUME PARTY

JANUARY 25, 8 P.M.–MIDNIGHT BUTTE PUBLIC LIBRARY

“Sandy,” I exclaimed, “I had no idea you are an aficionado of the Ploughman Poet.”

“His rhymes are all right if you like wee this and bonny that,” Sandison allowed. “But the main thing is his birthday comes at the time winter is driving people crazy. The library has been throwing this party for years. It was—it was Dora’s idea.”

“And what a nice one,” Grace warmly endorsed the notion of a Scottish extravaganza in the Constantinople of the Rockies, even if there were a few more wintry weeks to endure to get to it. “Thank you ever so much for the invitation, Samuel. We’ll be there in full regalia, won’t we, Morrie.”

“Unquestionably.”

“Eh, us, too.”

“Righto. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Sandison acknowledged our thanks with a slight bow, or at least his beard seemed to, and he hoisted himself off to his books. As Grace cleared the table, I headed to the living room to finally peruse the Sporting News. However, Griff and Hoop had preceded me as far as the staircase.

“Hsst. Can we have a word with you?”

I looked up to two worried faces, ancient as Ajax in the gloaming of the stairwell, halfway to the top. “And that word is . . . ?”

One hemmed and the other hawed, combining into the protestation that they did not want to hurt Sandison’s feelings, not the least little bit, understand, and I was beginning to before it came. “This Scotch party of his. Are we gonna have to wear them little dresses?”

“Kilts, you mean?” How mighty the temptation, to see the pair of them, bowlegged as barrel staves, stumping through the social evening in drafty Highland tartans. Somehow I resisted and told them they might well costume themselves as, say, shepherds instead.

After making absolutely sure that sheepherders wore pants even in Scotland, the two of them retired to their rooms and I set out for the living room again. Passing the door to Sandison’s library tower, though, on impulse I stopped and knocked.

“Come in, it’s on hinges.”

Seated at his desk as if moored there, he glanced up from what was evidently the latest treasure, still nested in its wrappings. “Ever seen this?”

Even closed, Oeuvres Complètes de Buffon was a true work of art, the leather spine elegance itself and the marbled cover aswirl with blues beyond blue. “Paris, 1885,” Sandison said clerically. “Go ahead, have a look.” Inside, the steel engravings of Buffon’s beasts and birds were the most vivid menagerie imaginable. It is a trick only the finest illustrators can pull off, a bit of egg white mixed into the hand coloring to give sheen and add life. Holding my breath, I turned the folio pages to the peacock. The colors practically preened off the page, so vivid were they.

“Exquisite, Sandy.” I thought again what an achievement a book is, a magic box simultaneously holding the presence of the author and the wonders of the world. Ever so carefully I shut the dazzling volume. “A marvelous find.” My curiosity couldn’t be held in. “Will it live here”—I meant the shelves stocked with his personal favorites, which ran to hundreds and hundreds of everything from fiction to phenomenology—“or downtown?”—meaning the public library.

“Haven’t quite decided.” He patted the gorgeous cover and chortled into his beard. “It would make the dimwit trustees sit up and take notice, wouldn’t it, to have this in the collection. The only copy west of Chicago.” Without looking up at me, he asked, “What’s on your mind besides your hat? You didn’t pop in here to see if I have Mother Goose Rhymes for bedtime reading.”

“It caught my attention during supper the other night that the mention of Teddy Roosevelt drew a bit of reaction from you.” He had harrumphed like a bullfrog. “I wondered why.”

“Of course it set me off, nincompoop. Knew him in the line of business, didn’t I.”

“What, politics? Sandy! Are you a secret Bull Mooser, you’re telling me?”

“Hell no, before any of that nonsense of him trying to be president every time there was an election.” Sandison gazed off into the distance of the past. “Teddy was a rancher out here for about as long as it takes to tell it. Had a herd of cattle, over in the Dakotas. One bad winter was all he could take, and he scooted back east to something simpler, like policing New York or conquering Cuba.” I waited. Sandison sighed, taking his voice down with it. “Yes, ninny, he was in the cattlemen’s association with me, at the time we had to deal with rustlers. Good citizen Theodore lucked out and didn’t get known as Roosevelt the Rope Fiend—his cowboys weren’t as quick at stringing up cow thieves as mine.”

How the strands of fate twine mysterious ways. One man is snared in the reputation of a vigilante, and another dangles free and becomes president. It would take more than leather-bound volumes of phenomenology to contain the workings of chance. Such thoughts were interrupted by the next rumble from Sandison. “You were smarter than you knew, using him in that editorial.” That is not a comment I too often get, and I cocked an eyebrow for him to continue.

“He’s popular as hotcakes in the great state of Montana, from being out here in boots and spurs,” Sandison obliged gruffly. “You’d think he was a top hand with cattle, when he hardly knew which end the grass goes in.” He laughed, none too humorously. “How you do it, Morgan, I don’t know, but sometimes you plunge in blind and come out walking on water. The Galilee shortcut, ay?”

“It is not a talent I set out to attain, actually.”

“It could be worse, you could have a knack for the accordion.” He fingered the Buffon bestiary again. “That educate you enough for one night?”

“Amply as always, Sandy.”

“By the way, the sliding door in the drawing room is stuck half-shut.”

“Righto,” I sighed.

•   •   •

Frowning so hard his green eyeshade was practically a beak, Armbrister summoned me into his office on an otherwise ordinary day of editorial mudslinging. “You seen this?” He brandished a galley of overset at me. When I took the freshly inked strip of proof sheet and held it up for a look, the spatters of consonants told me this could only be Griff’s contribution to “Voices of the Hill.” Armbrister meanwhile ranted that it “practically drove Sully cross-eyed setting it.” The compositor Sullivan who had delivered the item from the pressroom did look somewhat woozy on his way out. “What the blazes does it say, anyway?”

“Oh, a joke of some sort, I imagine. I told Griff to keep the item short and light.”

Armbrister nibbled his lip. “All those ffs, I don’t like the looks of it. What if it’s a dirty joke?”

“In Welsh?”

“Well, not that, then. Code of some kind to the Wobblies? Or something libelous about Anaconda? Those two old hoodoos aren’t exactly the souls of moderation.”

There he had a point. Now I was nibbling my lip. “We must trust Griff.”

“That’s not good enough. I’m not slapping something in the paper I can’t read a syllable of.”

“Jacob, really, it’s not intended for us, it’s for those miners whose souls still yearn for the sounds of the green valleys and gentle streams of Wales.”

“It’s still Greeker than goddamn Greek to me and I’m the editor.”

“Jake,” I tried, “you’re being overly suspicious.” He merely strummed his suspenders, waiting me out. “You win,” I conceded. “I shall take responsibility if anything goes wrong with it.”

“All right, we’ll run the thing.” Calling for a copyboy, the editor gave me a last speculative glance. “You’re adventurous, Morgie. That probably has double fs and ls in it in Welsh.”

•   •   •

After that, Griff was greeted on the street for days by fellow Welshmen who would repeat what sounded like a series of gargles and practically fall over laughing. Griff’s manner around the manse suggested authorship came naturally to the chosen, and he airily told me anytime the Thunder needed another contribution of the language of heaven, to just let him know. At first Hoop grinned along in the reflected glory, but something came over him during this time, I couldn’t help but notice. He was saying little at meals and bolting off to his room as soon as possible, and his mind often seemed elsewhere as Griff and he tackled the house’s latest ailment.

Finally came the morning when he caught me alone as I was about to leave for work, and hoarsely whispered, “Morrie, got a minute? There’s something I need to talk to you about awful bad.”

As he took me aside in the back hallway, I braced for the nature of the awful bad. Had I sundered his and Griff’s long-standing friendship with my bright idea about funny fillers? Was the something medical, old miners’ ramshackle bodies being what they were? Possibly the ailing house itself?

Worry etched in his face, Hoop looked deep into mine and husked:

“Do Huck and Jim make it?”

I blinked that in. “Both of them, I mean,” he went on anxiously. “Because if they catch that Jim and do to him—”

“Hoop, you’ve been reading, haven’t you.”

“A person can’t help it in this place.” He gestured helplessly. “Every time you turn around, there’s books fit for a king. Pick one up just for a look, and next thing you know, you can’t quit.” Indeed, there were fatigue marks under his eyes testifying to late nights in the company of open pages. “Griff’s got his nose in Kipling poems. Probably safer.” He looked at me fretfully. “If the two of them don’t get to New Orleans on that raft—”

I laid a hand on the bowed shoulder. “Rest assured, Mark Twain will not let you down.”

•   •   •

With the Robert Burns Birthday and Costume Party creeping up on us, Grace pondered what to wear. “Remember Edinburgh? Those plaids. I wish I had that shawl.” She paused to size me up like a draper. “And that Harris Tweed blazer you bought on Princes Street. You looked like the laird o’ the castle in it.”

We both knew where those items of apparel had vanished to. “Say no more,” I gave in to the inevitable. “I’ll go by the depot after work and see if by some miracle our trunk has appeared.”

But nothing that miraculous was produced, the depot agent merely reciting yet again that the lost would be found sooner or later. Given that my own trunk had been missing for practically an eon, that was less than reassuring.

It did not help my disgusted mood that the warehouse district down by the railroad tracks was a snowy mess, and to save my London shoes as I headed back uptown I picked my way along a different street than I had come, past a run-down warehouse where a truck with GOLDEN EGGS POULTRY FARMS on its side was parked out front. I was just passing when I was overcome with the uncomfortable feeling of being watched.

I checked around. Peering at me from the deepest recess of the warehouse doorway was a thickset figure with a face that advertised trouble. Old fear freshly flooded through me. A window man, even where there were no windows? Bundled up in overcoat and gloves as I was, I couldn’t reach to an inside pocket for my brass knuckles before he was on me like a springing tiger.

“Boss!” he yelped, grabbing my elbow. “We wasn’t expecting you! We heard you’d be in Great Falls about now, fixing the trouble with that speakeasy that got raided. Man oh man, you move fast.”

“You are—” I attempted to tell him he was wholly mistaken as to my identity but he cut me off with: “Smitty.” He winked. “I know we ain’t supposed to know each other’s real names, not even yours. But I never got to shake your hand at the big meeting back when Prohibition came in like Christmas all year long, and I been dying to ever since.” My hand was swallowed in his. “Boss, was you ever smart! This is the best racket ever.” It did not sound as if he meant poultry products.

My confidant stepped back in admiration. “What a slick disguise, dressing up in fancy threads. You look like one of them Vienna professors.” With my overcoat collar turned up and winter felt hat pulled down, the beard no doubt was my most prominent feature, not helping any in convincing this enthusiast that any resemblance he saw in me was coincidental. Finding my voice, I tried: “Really, I’m not—”

The engine roar of an automobile navigating the snowy street toward us at startling speed drowned me out. Smitty’s broad face registered alarm. Yanking a pistol from a coat pocket, he cried, “Watch out!” Before I could react, he bowled me over, tumbling us both into the snowbank near the Golden Eggs truck, him on top.

His action came barely in the nick of time, as a gunshot blasted over our heads and lead splattered against the brick wall of the warehouse. Gunfire gets your attention like nothing else. I held an aversion to guns. In my estimation, sooner or later they tend to go off, and I did not regard myself as bulletproof. Someone—who?—had just tested that out.

In the shock of it all I went inert as a mummy, but Smitty fortunately did not. Rolling off me where I was squashed into the snow, he swiftly was up and firing back at the vehicle speeding away.

“A shotgun, the dumb clucks,” he jeered as the car disappeared around a corner, “what’d they think, they’re hunting ducks? Everybody knows you can’t reload a double-barreled real quick.” Pulling me to my feet, he alternately wiped snow off my overcoat with the barrel of his gun and kept watch around the fender of the truck. “Amachoors. It’s that Helena gang. Don’t worry,” he risked stepping far enough into the street to retrieve my satchel for me, “we’ll hijack a couple of their loads on the Bozeman run. That’ll make them think twice about stunts like this.”

With gunfire still echoing in my ears, I numbly started to ask about the police. Smitty didn’t let me get past the word. “Nahh. Cops don’t come nosing around here. If they do, we’ll tell them we was shooting snowshoe rabbits.” He had me by the elbow again. “Come on in, quick, in case those dummies double back.”

That sounded prudent. But as soon as he bustled me into the huge warehouse, I regretted it with a nearly audible gulp. From behind file cabinets and desks and every other piece of furniture, a dozen or more men peeked in our direction, holding pistols like Smitty’s.

“Put away your artillery, boys,” he called out jovially. “Everything’s hunky-dory now, the Highliner is here.”

Instantly there was a swell of cries of “Yeah, hi, boss, great to see you!”

By now I realized I was in a precarious situation; the only question was, how deep. The picture before me was becoming all too clear. In back of the desks and filing cabinets, nearly filling the rest of the warehouse, stood a sleekly painted fleet of delivery vans, the majority with Golden Eggs blazoned on the sides, others with Treasure State Pork or some such. However, what they were delivering, I could tell at a glance, was not the product of hen and pig, but stacks and stacks of boxes labeled SUPERIOR RYE—CANADA’S TRADITIONAL WHISKEY.

“Them Helena jaspers,” Smitty was holding forth to an appreciative audience about our ambush escape, “they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. You shoulda seen the boss when they jumped us—he never said a word. Cool as ice.”

Frozen with fear was the more accurate description, a condition not allayed by facing a gang of gun-toting bootleggers who had mistaken me for their mastermind. This did not seem the right moment to set that straight. Ringed around me like admirers at a banquet, the whole assemblage awaited my words expectantly.

“How’s”—my voice sounded high as a choirboy’s. I cleared my throat and made a face. “Butte air.” They all laughed knowingly. “How’s business?”

There was a chorus of “Terrific!” “Great!” “Out of this world!” Then, though, a mustached individual, otherwise a bulky replica of Smitty, stepped forward with a worried frown. “Boss, I hate to tell you this when everything is running so slick, but we got a problem, up at the border.”

I cocked my head inquisitively, and he rushed out the news that the crossing point at Sweetgrass had been shut tight by federal alcohol agents. “They’re even inspecting carloads of nuns,” my mustached informant complained. By now I was putting two and two together and realizing that the Highliner, whoever he was, must be the authority on that northernmost “high” stretch of Montana, where the boundary line with Canada extended for hundreds of miles but roads were few.

A hush of expectancy settled over the assemblage as my solution—that of the evidently all-wise Highliner—to the border-crossing problem was awaited. Looking around the office section of the warehouse as casually as my nerves would allow, I spotted a roll-down map, such as had been in my Marias Coulee schoolroom. Stepping over to it, I yanked it down with a flourish, desperately hoping it was not a Mercator of the entire world.

I was in luck: the long-nosed profile of the state of Montana displayed itself. Still not saying a word, I studied the map. The Sweetgrass portal was like the lip of a funnel from Canada to main roads on the American side, which no doubt was why it had drawn the attention of the government agents. Off westward from there was what looked like wild country with no sign of habitation or roads. The old advice “Go west” had not failed me yet. As if back in a classroom, I seized the nearest item of any length lying around to use as a pointer, which happened to be a sawed-off shotgun. Mutely and gingerly, I held it by the grip and planted the end of the barrel at random on an obscure spot along the western reach of the Canadian border.

The bootleggers flocked around the map like crows at a picnic basket.

I waited tensely as they peered at the geography in studious silence until suddenly one of them broke out excitedly: “I know that neck of the woods, I’m from up toward there! The boss is right, there’s an old Indian trail through a gap in them benchlands up there. I bet it would take trucks!”

I nodded wisely, resisting an urge to wink lest I overplay the role. “It’s Whiskey Gap now,” Smitty declared, rubbing his palms together in satisfaction. “Didn’t I tell you the Highliner would have the answer?”

Very, very carefully putting down the sawed-off shotgun, I made a show of glancing at the wall clock as if pressed for time. But before I could make a move toward my departure, the mustached man was asking with urgency: “Boss, how’d that Great Falls mess come out? Did you get those cops that raided the speakeasy squared away?”

“We’ll—” I had to think hard for the barnyard phrase—“teach them not to suck eggs.”

Around the room a general nod of agreement indicated that took care of that, somehow.

Using the chance, I started to say it was time for me to take my leave, but reworked it in my head and brought out:

“I need to scram.”

Smitty put up a protesting hand. “Boss? We know you send Mickey around at the end of the month for it, but you brung your satchel and all—don’t you want the take? Save Mick the trip?” He gestured proudly. “We had a good holiday season. Everybody in Butte was busy hoisting drinks on New Year’s—boy, was they ever. Show him the dough, Sammy.”

I stood rooted, my dumbstruck expression mistaken for quizzical. The mustached thug went to the safe in the corner, knelt and spun the combination. When the safe clicked open, inside were stacked bundles and bundles of currency. Staring at the largesse, I was practically overcome with the memory of the munificent Black Sox bet. Here for the taking lay a similar fortune, sufficient to propel Grace and me back into the high life of the past year. A train tonight would put us and the bulging satchel in Seattle by this time tomorrow, and from there an ocean liner to Hawaii, Siam, Tasmania, anywhere . . . It was so tempting it was paralyzing. Like me, the whole roomful gazed reverently at the pile of cash.

Trying to keep the strain out of my voice, I said one of the harder things I have ever uttered.

“Let it sit on the nest and hatch out some more.”

An appreciative laugh rippled through the bootleggers. “You know best, boss,” said the mustached one, tenderly closing the safe. “While you’re here, you got any advice about how to keep the racket going so good?”

I stroked my beard as if in Viennese consultation. “Keep doing what you’re doing.” Leaving them with the simple wisdom of that, I rapped out, “Smitty?” He jumped like a puppet. “Walk me to the corner.”

•   •   •

“You don’t know who the Highliner is? Morrie, do you go around with your head under a bushel basket?” Across the table from me, Griff squinted as if trying to see if I was all there.

“Kind of a willie wisp,” Hoop propounded about my evident double. “Shows up somewhere and, poof, he’s gone.”

“This still tells me nothing definitive about his identity,” I pointed out.

Griff speedily took care of that. “He’s the number one bootlegger in the state. Most wanted man since Judas.”

“Nobody knows who he is,” Hoop anticipated my further question. “Drives the cops crazy.”

“I imagine.” Whatever his pedigree, the mastermind behind the fleet of egg trucks and similar innocuous delivery vehicles was resourceful. And to judge by that stack of cash in the safe, which still smarted to think about, highly successful. In any case, I felt fortunate to have dipped in and out of the Highliner’s persona without undue harm, and to have learned not to set foot in the warehouse district again. One shotgun blast was plenty. Not wanting to alarm her, I had not told Grace, or for that matter any of the others, about that episode of mistaken identity, let alone the gunfire. But I could see wifely curiosity being aroused as she followed my exchange with our tablemates. “Why do you ask, Morrie?”

“Merely keeping current. Newspaperman’s habit, you know.”

“Prohibition,” Sandison startled us all with a growl. “They might as well have tried to put a chastity belt on the entire country while they were at it. Pass the spuds.”

•   •   •

For days after that, I jumped a little every time an automobile backfired, but gradually my encounter with warring bootleggers began to fade. Memory shares some of the properties of dream, and as time passed, the episode softened into something like deep-of-the-night thoughts: Was that actually me, turning down a stack of money that barely fit into a safe? What bound me (and of course Grace) to Butte and its backstreet hostilities except a gift-horse mansion? Answer came none, as is so often the case with thoughts that appear in the night, and increasingly I had to put my mind to the field of battle across town, the Thunder’s hard-fought contest with our competitor.

Armbrister may have charged me with being venturesome in the matter of miners’ fillers enlivening the editorial page, but as editor he showed a bold streak himself. Those of us in the newsroom learned to sit back like pewholders about to hear thunder from the pulpit whenever he would hold up crossed fingers and announce, “Lords and ladies, I have a hunch.” From his years of servitude at the Daily Post, always referred to on our premises as the Silly Boast, he knew Butte inside and out, and so constantly tinkered with our journalistic offerings to entice readers away from our despised rival. One time the hunch, inspiration, mad notion purloined from somewhere might be a gossipy new feature called “Around the Lodges”—the city had fraternal organizations of every stripe and inclination—and the next, “The Homemaker’s Helper,” solicitously aimed at weary miners’ housewives trying to keep a family fed and fit on the pay their husbands brought from the Hill. “Cranking up the hurdy-gurdy,” he called such audience-pleasers.

Thus it was that I was manning my typewriter, firing editorial ammunition in the direction of the top floor of the Hennessy Building as usual, when the editor sauntered over, actually looking pleased about something.

“Guess what, Morgie, we’re coming up in the world. We’re going to start running the weekend stock exchange roundup.” His harsh laugh. “We’ve got a source for it, let’s say.” He flourished the galley of companies and numbers set in practically flyspeck type. “I have a hunch it’ll draw us readers with some actual bankrolls to their name,” he said with relish. “Horse Thief Row types and such.”

“Devoutly to be wished, I’m sure. May I?” I held up the galley, the better to scan it. “Anaconda, up three, too bad. Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, down one, so on and so on,” I skipped through. “Hmm, hmm, hmm, here it is.” My thumb at the particular listing, I showed Armbrister. “Nelots, unchanged.”

“Never heard of the company, but so what?”

“Envision that backwards, as the Post is counting on us not to.”

His face drooped. “‘Stolen.’” He grabbed back the galley as if it might singe him. “Those tricky bastards. They almost made me fall for it.”

“Nosce inimicum tuum,” I counseled, “Know thy enemy,” and went back to my typewriter to cannonade that foe some more.

•   •   •

Almost like a boxing match, that day held another round of parrying and punching. The presses had run, ours and the competition’s, like twin but opposing engines in the daily race for readers, and the rival versions of news and opinion had been dispatched to the streets, to be hawked on every corner by newsboys as usual. Most of the staff had left for the day, except as ever the few nightside reporters and rewrite men, and I was putting on my coat and trying to settle down Armbrister as he shook his head over the latest piece of “Voices from the Hill” overset. From the ranks of the Irish, it ran:

My sweetheart’s a mule in the mine,

I drive her with only one line.

On the ore car I sit,

While tobacco I spit,

All over my sweetheart’s behind.

“For crying out loud, Morgie, do we have to put this in the paper?”

“Of course we must. Quin sent it in, can’t you guess?” Armbrister looked even more pained. “Jacob, it actually serves the purpose quite well. In one regard, it is the very essence of Ireland, is it not?”

“This malarkey? How so?”

“It’s a limerick.”

The office door banging open ended that, as into the newsroom came Rab and Russian Famine, the one furious and the other downcast. “Hoodlums, that’s what they are,” Rab said through her teeth as she stormed over to Armbrister and me, “absolute hoodlums. Jared is in Helena or I’d have him find them and, and—” Dire enough punishment failed her. “Just look what they did to poor Famine.”

He had a bloody lip. Worse, tear tracks down his cheeks. Worse yet, his newspaper bag slung over one shoulder was torn and empty. “Got run off my corner,” the words practically twitched out of the upset boy. “Couple of the Posties slugged me and threw my papers in the gutter. Same thing happened to Abe and Frankie.”

And no doubt countless other Thunder newsboys, Armbrister and I understood with a glance at each other. “Isn’t this swell,” he uttered in a Job-like tone. “It leaves us with cigar stores and Blind Heinie’s newsstand and not a hell of a lot else to get the word out.” He threw his hands up. “Take me now, Jesus! Without newsies, we might as well be whistling down a gopher hole.”

As the editor’s lament raged on, Rab and I watched Famine test his split lip with his tongue.

After a little, I murmured to her, “Rab? I wonder—”

“Mr. Morgan,” she purred in my ear, “are you thinking the same thing I am?”

•   •   •

The detention school amounted to a slightly prettified reformatory, the high brick wall surrounding it garnished with a few flower boxes, growing nothing but icicles this time of year. According to one of Rab’s remarks, the soot-gray many-gabled residence on a shoulder of the Hill above Dublin Gulch had been a nunnery—a short journey for pious girls from the mine families, now a holding pen for troublous sons from those same shanties. As I topped the last street rise and left behind the world of downtown, the day was a rare one of winter clarity, the snow-held Rockies beyond the city limits dazzling in full sunshine, while the thirty or so mining operations in full swing along the Hill stood out in every detail of black steel headframe towers and bin cars loaded with peacock shades of copper ore and squat redbrick hoist houses throbbing and thrumming with cable work, the entire spectacle as if a gigantic factory had been thrown open for inspection.

The Richest Hill on Earth never ceased to thrill and chill me at the same time, with its powerful manufacturing of wealth and the squalid leavings of that, dump heaps like Sahara dunes and gaping bottomless pits called glory holes. And three times a day, the human equation came into stunning view as shifts changed and miners in their legions poured forth to and from neighborhoods gullied into the surroundings of machinery and dumps and pits. I am not subterranean by nature. Only once had I dared to go down in one of these mines, the forbidding Muckaroo on the crest of the Hill not far beyond the detention school, and it took every drop of courage in me to trek through a labyrinth of narrow, unforgiving tunnels. Yet beneath the ground I stood on, beneath all of Butte, around the clock three thousand men per shift drilled and blasted and shoveled in the most dangerous of circumstances to produce the metal that would wire the world for electricity. The old twofold question: What price progress, what cost if not?

With those thoughts in the back of my head, I rang at the iron front gate of what Russian Famine had aptly enough called the hoosegow school. But looking every inch the spirited schoolmistress rather than a jailer, Rab met me with a rush, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she hastened me into the building. “So far, we’re in luck, Mr. Morgan. I’ve sweet-talked the superintendent into it. If the boys can get steady jobs that don’t interfere with school, they can be let out for that period of time.”

“A perfect fit. You haven’t lost your wiles since you practiced them in my schoolroom, Rab.”

“Such things as I learned from you,” she acknowledged that trace of mischief with the right kind of grin, then turned seriously to the matter at hand. “I chose the seventh grade for this. The eighth are one step short of desperadoes.”

I smiled. “That hasn’t changed either.”

“Although I suppose I should warn you about even these.” She paused with her hand on the knob of the classroom door. “If you remember Eddie Turley”—my poorest and most ill-fated student, son of a bullying fur trapper, in that Marias Coulee schoolroom—“I have loads of him for you.” I assured her I was not expecting little gentlemen in velveteen.

Still, walking into that room was a step into bandit territory. Row on row, street toughs who looked hardened beyond their twelve and thirteen years—Rab had warned me they’d earned detention terms for fighting in class, petty theft, or chronic truancy, although some were simply from disrupted families that could no longer care for them—the lot of them were coldly eyeing me and my suit and vest. It was all I could do not to stare back. The youthful faces were sketch maps of Ireland, Italy, Cornwall, Wales, Finland, Serbia; early drafts of the mining countenances drawn from distant corners of the world by word of a hill made of copper. In the person of their immigrant fathers and mothers, Butte’s hard-won contribution to the American saga still went on, its next chapter these young lives ticketed, like those, to the mines.

“Mouths closed and eyes and ears open, everyone.” Rab swished to the front of the classroom, brisk as a lion tamer. “Today we have with us someone schooled in so many fields of learning it would tire you out to hear them. Except to say I will make anyone who misbehaves regret it to the end of time, I’ll let Mr. Morris Morgan tell you himself why he has come. Mr. Morgan, they’re all yours,” she demurely invited me up to the desk and blackboard, her eyes saying, Have at them.

That introduction did not impress the captive audience as much as might have been hoped. At desk after desk, young roughnecks slouched as if they had heard their fill from figures of authority, as they no doubt had. A fortunate exception, up front amid the obvious hellions, was a smaller, redheaded boy with the face of a Botticelli angel, watching as if he couldn’t get enough of me. It wrung a person’s heart to think of such a one cast out into the world; why someone had not put him in a pocket and taken him home, I couldn’t fathom. Meanwhile at the far back sat Russian Famine, prudently away from sharp elbows and random clouts, looking restless but curious. Well, two such were better than none. I cleared my throat and set to work on the rest.

“Your instructor, Mrs. Evans”—off to one side Rab tried to look matronly, not at all successfully—“has invited me to offer this select group a chance for each of you to go into business for yourself.”

“Huh, us? That’s a good one,” a long-shanked tough in the second row jeered. “Who do you want us to knock the blocks off of?”

I forced a chuckle. “I didn’t say that, did I. What Mrs. Evans and I have in mind is for you to become individual merchants. With the freedom of the city, at hours that won’t interrupt your, ah, education, in which to sell your merchandise.”

“Sellin’ what?” another sarcastic voice demanded. “Noodles to giraffes?”

“Nah, canary birds, cheap, cheap,” yet another member of the unholy chorus was heard from. Retribution in her eye, Rab started for the nearest offender until I held up a hand to stop her. “The merchandise,” I went on as if uninterrupted, “is the entirely honorable sort produced at the place where I myself work.”

“Yeah? Where’s that, then?”

“At a bastion of the Fourth Estate. At Butte’s citadel of fair enterprise,” I couldn’t help getting a bit carried away. “At the pinnacle of journalistic endeavor, the Thunder.”

In an instant the room rang with wild hoots. “You mean that rag down by Venus Alley? . . . Newsies! Beat that! He wants us to be newsies! . . . That don’t sound like no way to get rich.”

There was only one thing to do. Sighing, I took off my suit coat and rolled up my sleeves as if for a fight. Stepping closer to the blinking rank in the first row of desks, I singled out a chunky youth who had been one of the loudest hooters. Gazing at him so relentlessly his Adam’s apple bobbed, I demanded to know: “What day of the week is this?”

“T’ursday, natcherly.”

“What if I told you it had another name?”

“Uh, like what?”

I whirled to the blackboard and wrote in big letters THOR. “Thor’s day. In the time of some of your great-great-great-grandfathers, that was the pronunciation.”

“Yeah, so?” some skeptic called out. “Who’s this ape Thor?”

I glanced around for some kind of implement. The window crank would have to do. Seizing it by the handle, I leaped onto the teacher’s desk and brandished the blunt instrument overhead so threateningly that the entire front row reared back in their seats with a sucked breath. “THE GOD OF THUNDER!” I roared. “That’s who.”

While I had the class’s undivided attention, I stayed atop the desk and regaled them with the mighty reputation of Thor and his mountain-crushing hammer in the bloodiest of Viking myths. Rab had her hand over her mouth, eyes sparkling, and Russian Famine squirmed in excitement as I led the lesson around to thunder’s inception from lightning. “What we hear as that hammer blow of sound is the air being disturbed by the bolt of electricity. And so,” I concluded, still looking down at the pale sea of faces, “thunder comes of a troubled atmosphere. I hardly need to tell any of you that describes quite a lot of life here in Butte as well, hmm?”

While that hung in the air, I hopped down from the desk. “That’s why the newspaper is rightly called the Thunder, and why I think I’ve come to the right place for its best possible newsboys.”

“Yeah, but,” the silence was broken by a high-pitched voice from the end of another row, “my brudda tried that wit’ the Post. He always ended up wit’ a pile of papers nobody’d buy.”

“I promise that will not happen with the Thunder, which lives up to its word in fairness for the workers. We will buy back any of your unsold newspapers at half the street price,” I improvised, with mental apologies to Jared and Armbrister, who would have to figure out the further economics of that. “You’re guaranteed that much of a wage, while you’re making profits from all the papers you sell.”

“No hooey?” This came from the evident ringleader, who had spoken up at the very start. The others again let him speak for them all as he thought out loud, “There’s still a catch. The Posties already got the good corners.”

“Ah, but—every intersection has four corners.”

My questioner persisted. “Then what if the Posties don’t want us on any of ’em and gang up to run us off?”

“Streets are a public thoroughfare. You have as much right to be there as they do, if you take my meaning.”

“Now you’re talkin’.” He gave me a sudden wink, and craftily translated for the roomful of waiting faces. “If they try to give any of us a bad time, we all pitch in and knock their blocks off.”

“Yeah! You bet! That’s the way!” acclamation resounded, and with that, Rab moved in, bearing a large map of the city so that the carriers of the Thunder, as they now were, could each pick out intersections to claim as their own.

Stepping away from the stampede of newly made newsboys, I wiped my brow and was putting my coat back on when I heard a small, worshipful voice somewhere around my elbow. “That was really something, mister.” The cherubic one with the flaming hair was looking up at me with puppy eyes. “How you talked a streak like that.”

Resisting the urge to pat him on the head, I warmly thanked him for the compliment and he skipped away as I waited to have a last word with Rab, still busy enforcing crowd control at the map. All of a sudden, I heard a commotion in the hall outside the room.

“Give ’em back.”

“Lay off, Famine. Ow!”

“Give ’em back, I tell you.” The scuffle escalated until I rushed out and found Russian Famine with the wildly kicking redheaded tyke wrapped in a choke hold.

“He’s got something of yours,” Famine panted as soon as he saw me, discharging the little kicker in my direction. “He was just gonna pony up, wasn’t you, Punky.”

“Uh, sure.” The redheaded angel without wings shuffled toward me. “I found ’em just laying around.” Still with a guileless expression, he dropped into my hand with a clink the set of brass knuckles ordinarily in my suit coat pocket.

As the little pickpocket left us with a beneficent shrug and as I was hurriedly checking for my wallet and watch, Famine moved close and, eyes shining, said confidentially, “I bet knuckies like that are just the ticket in a fight, huh?”

“They can be.” I patted the side pocket where the knobbed brass items were safely restored. “But their greater use is in warding off fisticuffs. They serve as persuaders for the other fellow to think twice, shall we say.”

He pursed in thought. “That ain’t bad, either.”

Glancing in at the melee of newly minted news merchants around Rab and the map, I lowered my voice. “Famine, it might be best if my little metal friends stayed just our secret, do you think? Some of your, mmm, classmates could gossip in the direction of the wrong ears if they knew about these, perhaps.”

The boy’s face squinched in wise agreement. “Yeah. You never know what’s gonna happen in a hoosegow like this.”